Obviously, AI isn't an improvement, but people who blindly trust the news have always been credulous rubes. It's just that the alternative is being completely ignorant of the worldviews of everyone around you.
Peer-reviewed science is as close as we can get to good consensus and there's a lot of reasons this doesn't work for reporting.
But, technology also gave us the internet, and social media. Yes, both are used to propagate misinformation, but it also laid bare how bad traditional media was at both a) representing the world competently and b) representing the opinions and views of our neighbors. Manufacturing consent has never been so difficult (or, I suppose, so irrelevant to the actions of the states that claim to represent us).
You just give up on uneconomical efforts at accuracy and you sell narratives that work for one political party or the other.
It is a model that has been taken up world over. It just works. “The world is too complex to explain, so why bother?”
And what will you or me do about it? Subscribe to the NYT? Most of us would rather spend that money on a GenAI subscription because that is bucketed differently in our heads.